When I first began to think about Archie Albright, aged ten years, I was thinking of my own son at that age. He was a mad collector of war memorabilia and I imagined Archie was too. So I started ‘Archie’s Collection’, a shoe box that gradually filled with things from the period around WWI: marbles, badges, medals, comics, postcards from the trenches, stamps, army lists, dead beetles – really anything that I could beg, borrow or steal! I also discovered that we had a family album that was full of photographs, cigarette cards, postcards and letters from both WWI and WWII. As Archie’s box filled, so did my obsession with Archie and the war ... but a box is not a book, so I had to find a way to get Archie out of the box and on to the page.
A scrapbook seemed just the thing! So, because Archie lived in the East End of London and never had two pennies to rub together, I bought the cheapest, oldest looking one I could find and moved in to my grandchildren’s playroom. They have a little low desk in there, with little low chairs, crayons, stubby pencils, glue and all the grot that children gather about them. There I sat for the next eight months or so pretending I was Archie Albright! We cried together, laughed together and grew in our knowledge of the war and its many challenges together. In spite of the grim realities of war, which are not missing from Archie’s story, his strength, humour and passions got us through to the end and as Archie might say ‘we had some whacko times’ as well as some grim moments!
The photograph of Archie on the front cover of Archie’s War is actually my great uncle dressed in his dad’s uniform in 1914. He was ten years old at the start of WWI, just like Archie, and grew up to join the army and fight in WWII. Sadly, he was killed on his first day of action. It was this story that led me wonder what might have happened if Archie had also grown up to fight in WWII. What if he had stayed in Dorset, where we leave him at the end of Archie's War, grown up, had his own family and then been called up to fight? It was through this thought that his daughter’s story of WW11 was born Flossie’s Secret War Diary, which is a little longer than Archie’s scrapbook, because Flossie has a great deal to say for herself!
Both books are full of personal stories, family mementos, humour and passion as well as telling the stories of the two wars. As this year is the 90th anniversary of the armistice I hope that they do justice to the men, women and children who made that peace possible …as well as being a ‘flipping’ good read!